So, just in case you didn’t catch it yesterday, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the FCC has no jurisdiction to require broadband providers to treat all traffic on their networks equally. So, Comcast can block Bitorrent (or Hulu, or Skype, or all those fancy Iphone and Ipad apps), Verizon can relegate Time Warner VoIP phone traffic to the slow lane (and vice versa), Wal-Mart can pay for preferential treatment while Amazon stays on the equivalent of dial-up, and Rupert Murdoch can cut deals with Internet backbone providers (or even buy them up), to keep Fox-approved sites running fast, and anti-American sites (like Crooks and Liars, Media Matters, and, dare I suggest it, Morning Seditionists) all but unreachable.

Just to recap, corporations can buy up all the media outlets (newspapers, TV, and radio) in a market, they can directly fund political campaigns with no limits, and they can buy and control the Internet.

Even scarier, the Court declared that, if there’s gonna be Net Neutrality, Congress will have to legislate it. Let me just repeat that: we have to rely on Congress to not only understand the issue, but do the right thing. Lotsa luck.

Not counting last week’s massive storms and flooding, a new study shows that “extreme precipitation events” are becoming more prevalent – in line with Climate Change predictions.

The study…examined 60 years’ worth of National Weather Service rainfall records in nine Northeastern states and found that storms that produce an inch or more of rain in a day — a threshold the recent storm far surpassed — are coming more frequently.

“It’s almost like 1 inch of rainfall has become pretty common these days,” said Bill Burtis, spokesman for Clean Air-Cool Planet, a global warming education group that released the study Monday along with the University of New Hampshire’s Carbon Solutions New England group.

The study’s results are consistent with what could be expected in a world warmed by greenhouse gases, said UNH associate professor Cameron Wake.
[…]
What is more certain, researchers said, is the potential economic impact should the 60-year trend continue and require billions of dollars in infrastructure improvements to things in the region including roads, bridges, sewers and culverts.

On the bright side, once corporate control over the news and Internet has been fully asserted, we won’t have to hear all this bad, un-American news. So just sit back and watch the televised karaoke, and let Glenn Beck explain it all.